Google Bar for Firefox and the best office suite ever

Firefox now has a wonderful google bar available, one stable (for the risk averse) and one Beta (for those who live on the bleeding edge). The bar is especially useful for the smart set, with its quick university searches. And Google local, scholar, image, and the rest, are built right in–along with a nice interface for customizing what you want on the bar itself.

Also, this is a landmark week in the history of Open Office. 2.0 is out, and it is over-the-top wonderful. No user of MS Office will feel lost: the interface is the familiar but better. It strikes me as a massive improvement over Word in every way, and if the PowerPoint and Excel features are as good (I haven’t tried them yet) it could easily rival the MS suite. The iconography of seagulls says it all: freedom from crazy license issues, freedom from messy codes, freedom from boggy functionality. You will never go back. (Because of crushing demand, downloads have been slow for a few days.)

Share

7:36 am on March 8, 2005